Sunday, February 1, 2015

Two bits of news about Russian literature awards. Sorry, sports fans: this stuff
is far more exciting than any Super Bowl!

Aleksei Tsvetkov

The NOS(E) award’s jury prize for 2014 was selected on Friday: Aleksei Tsvetkov won for his story collection Король
утопленников (Kingof the Drowned) and Vladimir Sorokin won
the reader prize, announced earlier last week, for his Теллурия (Tellurium). Tsvetkov, who is often referred
to as “the younger” to distinguish him from the Aleksei Tsvetkov who is known as
a poet and essayist, arranged his collection’s stories in order of length, from
shortest to longest. The collection is available online here and published
under Creative Commons. When Tsvetkov won the Bely Prize for King last fall, I wrote that the stories
looks appealing… and I still think so.

Meanwhile, in Paris, Hélène Sinany won the 2015 Prix Russophonie for Le Persan, her translation of Alexander
Ilichevsky’s Перс (The Persian). The book was published by Gallimard.

Up Next: I’ll be getting
back to a more normal reading, posting, and sleeping schedule now that I’ve turned in
a manuscript! Upcoming posts will cover Evgeny Vodolzakin’s Solovyov and Larionov, which I loved; Gleb
Shulpyakov’s Museum Named After Dante,
which I found mysteriously enjoyable; and Alexei Nikitin’s Victory Park, which is strangely endearing despite having too many
backstories for its own good… I’m going to finish Victory Park tonight and then start something friends brought me
from Moscow last month, probably Lena Eltang’s Cartagena: I read
a large chunk of the book electronically when I translated excerpts last fall
and can’t wait to read the whole thing now that the book is out on paper.